Made by solo indie dev Daniel Santalla, Desktop Fishes launched in mid-November 2025 and is a cute little relaxing idle game. It’s out right now on Steam at a super cheap price, allowing you to add little ikkle fishies to your desktop and they swim around as you do your work. Lovely jubbly. 🐠

The Chilled Out World of Desktop Fishes

The point of idle games is to keep them on loosely in the background, returning to them every now and then to check your progress. Our favourite from the genre is the cosmic mania of SPACEPLAN (2017), which has a fantastic soundtrack and some physics-based excellence.

Desktop Fishes is a totally different beast.

The focus here is on chilled out minimalism with cutback features. The idea is to have it running whilst you go about work, watching as your digital aquarium gradually gets bigger. You start with an egg, this then hatches into your first fish, and things continue on from there.

Over time, simply by existing, each fish generates in-game currency. You can use this to buy more fish and before you know it there are loads of the bastards all over your screen! It’s all rather charming.

But there are also some excellent little modes that have been added in settings. Including the:

• Choice of screen to add the fishes on (if you’re using dual monitors)
• Chance to turn a lightbulb on and off (great for night-time mode)
• Wallpaper or overlay mode (so the game sits above or behind the work you’re doing)
• Shop area (where you can buy some fancy goodies)

We took to simply running it in the background whilst we worked on this website (Professional Moron). And we can imagine ourselves doing that all the time for the foreseeable future (as we type, fish are everywhere dagnammit!!!).

Santalla was very open with the game’s development on Twitter, so we followed this game’s progress closely. Now it’s out, a few streamers (such as Cozy Gaming Videos below) have covered the title. This video gives you a closer look into what’s on offer.

Having covered the oddball Dreamcast game Seaman recently, with its mildly disturbing themes and human-fish hybrid monstrosity, Desktop Fishes is a much better time of it.

It’s cute, it’s fun, it’s relaxing, and what more could you want for £3?